The admirable Klassiki streaming service, in response to some modest proposals from myself, is now showcasing five movies from central Asian film-makers, and the first is this absolute gem from Kyrgyzstan. It is an autobiographical movie by writer-director Aktan Abdykalykov, much acclaimed on the European festival circuit on first release in 1998: a very personal and immediate film, but with the mystery and calm of a folk tale. It’s a story of the director’s own childhood, and he casts his own teenage son Mirlan as himself. Beshkempir has the fluency and candour of something by Satyajit Ray and its ecstatic retrieval of memory makes me think of Fellini’s Amarcord.
The film is mostly in black and white but starts in colour and enigmatically gives us flashes of colour throughout, picking out significant images with stabs of rapture: birds, a stretch of sky, a handful of money. We begin with a child’s adoption ritual, the colour of this sequence focusing on the richness of the rugs used and the traditional cradle. We then flashforward 13 years or so and this same baby is now a tough-looking kid, impassively looking at us as he gets his hair cut; this is Mirlan Abdykalykov who reminds me of Shane Meadows’s regular Thomas Turgoose.
-copy-dd1f2bf0.jpeg?w=600)
